Recommend me something similar to Hole's 'Celebrity Skin'

srsly tho, '98/'99 was the closest either of us ever came to being "legit" (i was doing totally corporate office jobs, wearing suits to work, expensing everything), and we both looked great and slim and healthy (i was going to the gym ALL the time), and we were both dating film-industry dudes and blagging our way into all their parties and screenings and stuff. and that was also around the first time in my adult life i'd been to los angeles (i listened to celebrity skin on the greyhound on my way in, and it sounded PERFECT).

Oddly, I hear bits of Tara Key's Bourbon County in Celebrity Skin's unabashed jangly hookiness, but on a hugely more low-fi scale - no gloss whatsoever. Tara Key is more like Celebrity Skin divided by Yo La Tengo's Painful.

The combined pixie-dust of Corgan and Michael Beinhorn on Celebrity Skin is sheer pop alchemy. I love it.

America's Sweetheart was better in theory than in practice. It could have been the album where she capitalized on Celebrity Skin and went full-out pop. As it is, it sounds like a step back from Celebrity Skin.

America's Sweetheart was better in theory than in practice. It could have been the album where she capitalized on Celebrity Skin and went full-out pop. As it is, it sounds like a step back from Celebrity Skin.

"Really? You don't see a connection between CS and, say, "1979"? I think the latter is built to accomodate Corgan's vocal qualities, but it's not that far away from "Malibu." Like the nighttime version of that or something."

I should clarify Eppy - there's definite similarities in the music, it's just that the difference in vocals makes me tend to overlook them.

And, as I keep wanting to yell out, the best songs on Celebrity Skin had no Corgan involvement (I'm taking about the amazing late-album run of "Use Once & Destroy", "Borthern Star" and "Boys On The Radio")

And, as I keep wanting to yell out, the best songs on Celebrity Skin had no Corgan involvement (I'm taking about the amazing late-album run of "Use Once & Destroy", "Northern Star" and "Boys On The Radio")

i forget, did he have a hand in "petals"? that song kills me... sheesh, talk about fleetwood goth. completely girly and witchy.

Ned perhaps the difference b/w Celebrity Skin and "Today" is that the irony isn't laid quite so bare - the choruses of "Today" call out the verses as liars, whereas on the sunny numbers on Celebrity Skin do not let their masks slip so much, or perhaps it's that they're pitched at a place where sunniness and suicidal depression can co-exist more easily . "Awful", "Malibu", "Boys on the Radio" all focus around notions of disillusion and dissolution, damage and decay - not physical but emotional/psych/social... "How are you so burned when you're barely on fire?" "I know that you were rotten to the core"... and yet this does not render their sunniness sarcastic, they're much more wistful than anything else, and maybe this is why people think of "1979" (except that "1979" is only wistful: Corgan is more interesting in focusing on one particular emotion and taking it to extremes, it's the goth in him. Courtney is aware that songs mean different things for different people, have multiple purposes. This is perhaps the pop star in her)

.I'm tempted to think the use of musical sunniness in Celebrity Skin is a meta-statement about the triumph of music over biography. In the same way that Fleetwood Mac's songs persevere on radio long after everyone has forgotten the intra-band warfare, Courtney's lyrics seem obsessively focused on the afterlife of Nirvana etc. ("all the boys on the radio/they crash and burn they fold and fade so slow..."), "the legacy" for better or worse. So she writes (or co-writes) deliberately "timeless"-sounding rock music to comment on the fragility of a moment in rock - the star winks out but the songs live on, she says, and I want mine to as well..

I dunno, I hear late-period Courtney stuff as very sunsetty, very dusk, so really only a few hours away from a lot of Pumpkins stuff. Maybe this is just contextual, but I have a really hard time not hearing "Today"'s sunniness as so teeth-clenchingly ironic that it becomes kind of a tanning booth. But oops, I just slipped into rock-cric-metaphor hell.

My favorite song off CS by far is "Awful," I think it's one of the best songs of all time--it's many things, but one of the things it is is the most honest document of being a musician I've ever heard.

Courtney is aware that songs mean different things for different people, have multiple purposes.

i think it's just that she's so scatterbrained that she has a new emotion every five seconds, or she can find a variety of different emotions in one stock "mood" (how many people ever only feel DEPRESSED when they're sad? no, they feel sarcastic, wistful, mad, confused, occasionally exhilarated).

The only thing I recal thinking about this song is that it was a knockoff of "He Hit Me (And It Felt Like A Kiss)."

it took me many years to admit this, but i like it more than "he hit me." it feels more vulnerable, not quite so glib and arch in its irony.

sure! I love the whole record, why not. "Reasons.." has the "miles and miles of perfect skin" line in it, and a Pavement reference and "When the fire goes out you better learn to fake/It’s better to rise than fade away." so great.

perhaps it's that they're pitched at a place where sunniness and suicidal depression can co-exist more easily

I think it's basically.. the 90's was all about boys on the radio caught in, uh, downward spirals and Courtney's saying, stop, enough of this! (I agree.) I don't find it nihilistic in the least - all the references to passing moments & fading away are more.. acknowledging that & moving on, really. Never been a fan of Billy Corgan but he seems totally stuck in that old melodrama.